Get Best Out of Google: Search Google Effectively

Google can be considered as the best search engine because of its speed, reliability, user-friendliness and ease. Another major benefit of Google is its simplicity and fewer advertisements that other search engines lack.

Google search summary infographic

Google search trick in briefest summary! (Click to enlarge the image)

Unlike other search sites, Google’s landing page is indeed simple and clean, loads quickly, and delivers the best results of any search engine out there, because of its PageRank technology and massive listings. However, search experts say that no single search engine provides the most relevant results for all queries. Google is ranked most visited site and most used search engine because more people use it than any other search engine.

Google is a crawler-based engine- this means it has software programs that ‘crawl’ the all information on the internet and add it to its database. Google is a good first place to start when searching. Google is greatly reputed for relevant and thorough search results. Its search algorithm brings the most relevant items on the top.

Below are some Google search tips & tricks on how you can use Google effectively and get best out of it:

Basic Operators

+

Forces words to be included in search results. Useful with stop words that otherwise will be discarded. For example: Black + Coffee will include all results that include words both Black and Coffee.

This excludes the mentioned term to show in results, for example searching for “Mobile -phone” will show results showing ‘Mobile’, but will avoid ‘phone’!

OR

Returns results with one of the given terms, like Computer or Laptop. You can also use | instead of OR: Computer | Laptop

“ ”

Using quotes forces google to search for the exact phrase (including stop words), try “doughnut at midnight” and doughnut at midnight.

~

Allow to search also for synonyms of the given word. searching for ~fast food will give results for fast food, junk food, etc.

*

Fills in the Blank. try Isaac Newton discovered *

..

Used to search in a range of numbers, “2..20 doughnuts” will find pages containing “I eat 3 doughnuts a day” and “I’ll never eat more than 15 doughnuts in a month”
This operators can be combined to create advanced queries, for example “I eat 1..100 doughnut OR doughnuts OR donut OR donuts each *”

Related Search:

To search for web pages that have similar content to a given site, type “related:” followed by the website address into the Google search box. For example, related:www.cnn.com.

Advanced google operators

time:

To see the time in many cities around the world, type in “time” and the name of the city. For example, “time Ahmedabad

daterange:

Returns documents modified in the given time interval. Dates should be entered in julian format (so geeky, but a bit unusable).
Using doughnuts daterange:2454091-2454101 you can find who talked about doughnuts in the last ten days of 2006.

filetype:

returns links to documents with the given file type.
For example searching for doughnuts filetype:pdf will find portable and object-oriented doughnuts.
Currently officially supported file types are pdf, ps, wk1, wk2, wk3, wk4, wk5, wki, wks, wku, lwp, mw, xls, ppt, doc, wks, wps, wdb, wri, rtf, swf, ans, txt, but other are supported as well, like xml, cpp, java etc.

site:

restricts the results to the given domain. site:techforworld.com will find all indexed page on www.techforworld.com, while site:techforworld.com doughnuts will find all doughnuts-related pages on www.techforworld.com .
update: you can use the site operator also to find your supplemental results using this query:site:www.techforworld.com *** -sljktf. (taken from an intresting article about Google Supplemental Index Results by Aaron Wall)

cache:

shows the cached version of given webpage. Other words in the query will be highlighted in the returned page, try cache:www.techforworld.com doughnuts

link:

lists webpages that link to the given webpage. link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut will list webpages with links pointing to wikipedia’s voice for Doughnut

related:

returns pages that google somehow thiks are related to the given page. Not always accurate.

info:

returns some informations about the given web page. Typically website and description.

define:

returns the definition of a given word. Try define:software.

phonebook:

search in residential phone book. sample: phonebook:smith Los Angeles

stocks:

returns stock info: try stocks:goog

weather:

weather informations for the given city. weather:los angeles

Sunrise & Sunset:

To see the precise times of sunrises and sunsets for many U.S. and worldwide cities, type “sunrise” or “sunset” followed by the city name. For example, sunrise New Delhi.

movie:

returns all movies related to the search term given. Sample: movie:doughnuts
You can also find movies by locations: movie:nyc , movie 10015

Flights:

you can search for flights inside USA using the airport code (does not work for every airport). sample:jfk lax

SEO-oriented Operators

allintitle:

Search for documents with the given words in their title. allintitle:doughnuts chocolate will find all the documents with title containing ‘doughnuts’ and ‘chocolate’. This operator cannot be combined with others.

intitle:

Search for documents with the first word after the intitle operator in their title. intitle:doughnuts chocolate will find all the documents with title containing ‘doughnuts’ and talking about chocolate. Note that the word ‘chocolate’ is not necessarily in the title.

allintext:

Search for documents with the given words in their text. allintext:doughnuts chocolate will find all the documents with text containing ‘doughnuts’ and ‘chocolate’.This operator cannot be combined with others.

intext:

Search for documents with the first word after the intext operator in their text. intext:doughnuts chocolate will find all the documents with text containing ‘doughnuts’ and talking about chocolate. Note that the word ‘chocolate’ is not necessarily in the text

allinurl:

Search for documents with the given words in their url. allinurl:doughnuts chocolate will find all the documents with url containing ‘doughnuts’ and ‘chocolate’. This operator cannot be combined with others.

inurl:

Search for documents with the first word after the inurl operator in their url. inurl:doughnuts chocolatewill find all the documents with url containing ‘doughnuts’ and talking about chocolate. Note that the word ‘chocolate’ is not necessarily in the text

allinanchor:

Search for documents with the given words in an anchor. allinurl:doughnuts chocolate will find all the documents with anchor text containing ‘doughnuts’ and ‘chocolate’. This operator cannot be combined with others.

inanchor:

Search for documents with the first word after the operator in an anchor. inanchor:doughnuts chocolatewill find all the documents with anchor containing ‘doughnuts’ and talking about chocolate. Note that the word ‘chocolate’ is not necessarily in an anchor.

Google Calculator Guide

+ – * / % ^

you can use Google as a calculator, using standard symbols, for example
3+2 returns 5
4-1 returns 3
6*8 returns 48
15/5 returns 3
3^2 returns 9 (3 raised to power 2)
5%2 returns 1 (the remainder after division)

sqrt,nth root ofx

sqrt(49) returns 7, if you need non-square roots you can use for example 3th root of 27.

sin, cos, arctan, tan…

google calculator supports various trigonometic functions, expecting a radians value, that can be expressed also using the pi constant: sin(pi/2)tan (2/3*pi)

ln

returns natural (base e) logarithm: ln(e^5)

log

returns base 10 logarithm: log(100)

!

returns n factorial: 3!
Numbers can be entered also in hexadecimal, octal and binary base, using 0x, 0o and 0b prefixes, for example 5 +0xf+0b1001

Conversions

Google supports a lot of conversion tools, here is a small guide:

in degrees / in radians

you can convert radians to degrees: pi/2 in degrees or convert degrees into radians: 90 degrees in radians

in hex / in binary / in octal / in decimal

you can convert to each of the given bases: 16 in hex , 16 in octal16 in binary0×11 in decimal
you can also use 2007 in roman numerals (in case you’re building a temple and you need to know how to write the year on it)

distance conversions

you can use 100miles in km , 1m in mm, but also 200000 km in light-second etc.

speed, time, temperature

currency

cooking

One thing most people don’t know: Google also supports complex, multiple unit conversions. Here are some examples, just type them in search box:

2 years + 5 months + 10 days + 11 hours = days
50 USD + 15 british pounds + 10 swiss francs + 5 euros = indian rupee
7 kilogram + 2 pound + 45 gram + 5 ounce = kilogram

Spell Checker:
Google’s spell checking software automatically checks whether your query uses the most common spelling of a given word. If it thinks you’re likely to generate better results with an alternative spelling, it will ask “Did you mean: (more common spelling)?”. Click the suggested spelling to launch a Google search for that term.For example, Expolsion.
Note: Google™ is the registered trademark owned by Google, Inc.

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    Google’s rise to success was in large part due to a patented algorithm called PageRank that helps rank web pages that match a given search string. When Google was a Stanford research project, it was nicknamed BackRub because the technology checks backlinks to determine a site’s importance.:^

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